“Steven Soderbergh’s movies are a testament to his love of a good crime caper. From the Ocean’s films on through to Logan Lucky, the director’s fondness for a well-executed plan—or just an executed plan, really, no skill required—shines through. The only thing he might love more is an unreliable narrator, which allows…

In 1992, Robert Harris wrote a popular novel of alternative history, Fatherland, a police thriller set a few decades after the Axis powers won the Second World War. Munich, his latest work, for a time seems to be premised in an alternative history of its own, one in which the war is stopped before it even gets started.